KABUL — A suicide bomber killed a dozen people, including a leading tribal elder and five children, as they left a meeting Wednesday in an eastern province of Afghanistan where American forces have battled insurgents in recent weeks.

President Hamid Karzai, NATO and U.S. Embassy officials condemned the morning attack on Malik Zareen, an elder who the Afghanistan leader said was “struggling for peace and solving people’s problems.”

“Organizers of this brutal attack showed that they fear these elders who understand them and their wrong and inhuman intentions,” Karzai said in a statement. “By killing them, they want to silence the peaceful voice of the people of Afghanistan and undermine the strength of the country.”

Source of attack unclear

Police and local officials said it was unclear who carried out the attack in the Asmaar district of Kunar province, where the insurgency is well-entrenched.

A Taliban spokesman said the group was not responsible for the bombing. The area is home to a number of militant groups, including the Taliban-allied Haqqani network and Hezb-i-Islami, led by veteran commander Gulbuddin Hekmatyar.

“This attack demonstrates how desperate insurgents are to prevent progress by targeting Afghanistan’s traditional leaders and elders,” Rear Adm. Hal Pittman, a spokesman for NATO forces, said in a statement.

Zareen, a former mujahedeen commander who fought the Soviet Union’s forces during the 1980s, had a good relationship with NATO forces in the area and with Afghanistan’s central government, according to the chairman of the Kunar provincial council, Haji Nia Hassan.

Zareen had been shot at before by local enemies, Hassan said, but had not been singled out for attack by the Taliban or any warlords.

Meeting of elders

The attacker targeted Zareen and other tribal elders as they were leaving a house where they had been meeting, mingling with them in a cemetery outside the house before detonating a vest packed with explosives, according to the local police chief, Gen. Khalilullah Ziayi.

In addition to those killed, seven people were injured, Ziayi said.

Kunar province has seen heavy clashes in recent weeks as Afghan soldiers and NATO International Security Assistance Forces attempted to rout insurgents and foreign fighters who had crossed the border from strongholds in Pakistan’s western tribal regions to attack isolated U.S. outposts.

Also in the east Wednesday, a NATO soldier was killed by a roadside bomb. Military officials did not disclose the soldier’s nationality or where he was killed.

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